NJ College Prep School Leverages 100 Percent Fiber Network

Optimum Lightpath® today announced that Morris Catholic High School has deployed its 100 percent fiber network.

Morris Catholic High School serves 40 towns and communities within Morris County, New Jersey. The school enrolls 430 students, grade nine through 12. Before working with Optimum Lightpath, Morris Catholic experienced ongoing Internet outages and had limited bandwidth, making it challenging to roll out the latest technologies to support learning. Teachers were frustrated that certain online elements couldn’t be incorporated into the classroom and students sometimes had difficulty connecting to the Internet to conduct research.

“We knew that we had to make a big change to our network infrastructure in order to introduce new technology-based learning initiatives for our students,” said Michael St. Pierre, president of Morris Catholic High School.

Upon installing Internet Voice Bundle from Optimum Lightpath’s Education Services Suite, Morris Catholic was able to add more technology into its curriculum. It also looked for ways to evolve how it communicated with students and families. The overhaul has resulted in the introduction of a school podcast, Apple® iPhone® and Google® Android® apps, and the rollout of interactive white boards. This school year, Morris Catholic began an ambitious one-to-one Apple iPad® program for all of its ninth graders. The school intends to eventually deploy iPads to every student in every grade.

“Everything from the classroom environment, and how students are learning and being engaged, to how the administration is interacting with each other and students has totally taken on a new life,” said Matthew Alpaugh, director of communications and alumni for Morris Catholic High School.

Morris Catholic has also benefited from an administration perspective. The school is relying more heavily on email and IRC chat for communication, and the cloud to host a variety of documents that students, staff and school families can access directly. When the school needs to increase bandwidth, St. Pierre knows that it can do so quickly to keep the school moving in lockstep with its latest pursuits.

“Morris Catholic is constantly challenging the status quo,” said St. Pierre. “We want to be known as a school that is rife with innovation and part of that means working with innovative companies. The result has been a frictionless technology-based learning environment without boundaries.”

The Glen Rock Public School District includes 2,500 students and 300 staff in six schools across five buildings. While the district has long supported a technology-infused curriculum, a legacy network had begun limiting opportunities to advance learning.

Though ongoing budget limitations remain a challenge statewide, ten New Jersey schools will have the opportunity to roll out ambitious, technology-driven learning programs in their classrooms as a result of $100,000 in grants being given by Optimum Lightpath®.

Brewster Academy, an independent college preparatory school in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, is deploying a new Aruba wireless LAN (WLAN) with the AirWave Network Management System and the ClearPass Access Management System.